What’s in the Name?

What’s in the Name?

140 miles east of cool is both a place and a space.

As a place, 140 miles east of cool is where I live—exactly 140 miles east of Bozeman, Montana in the “Magic City” of Billings, MT.

As a space, 140 miles east of cool lies at the margins of the metaphorical epicenters of the amenity west: places like Bozeman, Aspen, and Boulder.

Wallace Stegner wrote: “People in unfashionable or provincial places are made to feel a sort of colonial complex, and one response to that feeling of inferiority is an indignant assertion of equality and maybe even superiority.”

That’s not what this is about.

This blog is a way of exploring the metaphors and incoherencies at the center of western self-fashioning.

you can email me at bpj [at] the URL of this blog.